Perhaps the most obvious element of his character was his essential innocence and simplicity, with all the curious secondary traits that accompany a nature fundamentally incapable of becoming sophisticated. Love of nature was one part of it. To an exceptional degree he loved to walk in the woods and to make long sojourns in the country. Lying on his back in the fields, staring into the sky, he forgot himself and his anxieties in a kind of ecstatic delight. Klober, the painter, writes: ‘He would stand still, as if listening, with a piece of paper in his hand, look up and down, and then write something.’ Not always was he quiet, but often strode impatiently along, humming, singing, or roaring, with an occasional pause for the purpose of making notes. In this manner dozens of sketch books were filled with ideas which enable the student to trace, step by step, the evolution of his themes. An Englishman who lived in intimate friendship with him for some months asserts that he never ‘met anyone who so delighted in nature, or so thoroughly enjoyed flowers, clouds, or other natural subjects. Nature was almost meat and drink to him; he seems positively to exist upon it.’ This quality is emphasized by Beethoven’s letter to Therese Malfatti, in which he says: ‘No man on earth can love the country as I do. It is trees, woods, and rocks that return to us the echo of our own thought.’ Like the Greeks, he could turn the dancing of the Satyrs into an acceptable offering on the altar of art. Of this part of his nature, the Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony is the monument. It is as if he took special occasion, once for all, to let speak the immediate voice of Pan within him. It is full of the sights and sounds of nature, not, however, as Beethoven himself says, a painting, but an expression of feeling. In an analysis of the _allegro_, referring to the constant repetition of short phrases, Grove says: ‘I believe that the delicious, natural, May-day, out-of-doors feeling of this movement arises in a great measure from this kind of repetition. It causes a monotony--which, however, is never monotonous--and which, though no _imitation_, is akin to the constant sounds of nature--the monotony of rustling leaves and swaying trees, and running brooks and blowing wind, the call of birds and the hum of insects.’ And he adds, as a summing up of its beauty: ‘However abstruse or characteristic the mood of Beethoven, the expression of his mind is never dry or repulsive. To hear one of his great compositions is like contemplating, not a work of art or man’s device, but a mountain, a forest, or other immense product of nature--at once so complex and so simple; the whole so great and overpowering; the parts so minute, so lovely, and so consistent; and the effect so inspiring, so beneficial, and so elevating.’